This CD begins with a track entitled ‘A Kind of Red’, combining the first part of Miles’ best known album with the title of a King Crimson album from the mid 1970s. I saw this as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the challenges of jazzing the music of the progressive rock band King Crimson, which is the focus of these recordings. The Delta Saxophone Quartet have already shown that they can reimagine prog rock, with their previous album of Soft Machine songs. At its worse, prog rock was often derided as overly structured noodling over a thumping drumbeat. What made King Crimson stand out for me was the way in which much of the big riffs or the vocal lines provided the scaffolding through which Robert Fripp wove his incredible guitar lines. So, any experiment in taking King Crimson tunes into a new context will always wrestle with the ghost of Fripp’s guitar. Should the pieces attempt to recreate his playing (like Gil Evans did with his reworking of Hendrix tunes) or should they look to the themes of the music, taking the scaffold and then adding their own adornments? The selection of pieces in this set feel as if they have been carefully selected for exactly this latter approach. They either work the big riff, as in ‘The Great Deceiver’ (from 1974’s Starless and Bible Black) or the vocal lines, as in ‘The Night Watch’ from the same album, or mixture of both, as in ‘Dinosaur’ from Thrak of 1995.

Given Simcock’s previous experience of playing with Bill Bruford (long time drummer of King Crimson), the rhythmic sense of the pieces is often captured impressively; albeit with the tempos toyed with. While this harks back to my earlier suggestion of the tongue-in-cheek feel of some of the pieces, it also points to the huge gap left when King Crimson pieces are ‘de-Fripped’. So, if these are intended as a tribute to King Crimson, the pieces feel somewhat off-kilter. However, the strength of the recording lies in the interplay between the instruments, using the themes of the pieces as a jumping off point to explore rhythmic and harmonic patterns of much subtlety. Indeed, it is often easy not to notice the absence of the traditional bass and drums rhythm section, so well do the players pulse and accent the pieces, swapping the roles of rhythm and lead with ease. One gets the sense that camaraderie between the musicians on these pieces would make for a very compelling and exciting experience on stage. This would be a great set of pieces to see live, and as a jazz set the whole collection works really well.

Reviewed by Chris Baber

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